People On The Internet Can't Decide What Colour These Shoes Are. Can You?
Mint/teal & grey or pink & white?
By Sadho Ram — 15 Oct 2017, 05:43 PM
As if 2015's viral sensation of "the dress" didn't break enough relations, it appears a pair of Vans shoe and the debate around them will break more relations in 2017
Over the week, a lot of people took to social media arguing each other over the colour of a pair of Vans sneakers
'The dress' situation all over again! I see mint green and grey. What colour do you see? #lbloggers pic.twitter.com/cfxV2wq7aa
— Chloe (@_chloehx_) October 11, 2017
Ok. The shoe was most definitely grey/teal... and then I stared at it for a minute trying to convince myself otherwise... now its pink/white
— Tom Giles (@TomGilesNBCS) October 12, 2017
rt if u see pink and white
— give ksoo a (@solornbalbum) October 13, 2017
fav if u see grey and green mint pic.twitter.com/nS0k557wSp
you can literally go on the vans website and find this exact shoe a teal & gray vans doesnt exist pic.twitter.com/loprfcNGBK
— Apparently Obi-Wan? (@TheLEGOCantina) October 11, 2017
Oh ffs. I started seeing mint & grey and now I see pink & white and now I'm stressed and I hate everything and everyone. SCREW YOU TRAINERS! pic.twitter.com/yyO0AzIx5b
— Nicola Hume (@Nicola_Hume) October 12, 2017
Apparently, no one seems to agree on the colour of the shoes. Some say that the picture below shows a mint/teal and grey shoe, while others insist it's pink and white.
The crux of the matter is that the mint/teal and grey Vans don't even exist. People seeing the mint/teal and grey are looking at a picture that was manipulated using flash and darkened to make it look like the Vans are mint/teal & grey.
So how come some people have described that after seeing mint/teal and grey they slowly started seeing the image as ping and white over time?
Well, according to Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at the National Eye Institute in the US, it was because people's brains were trying to separate what they identified as colour cast by the source of light from that reflected by the surface they were looking at.
"Basically, your visual system is constantly trying to colour-correct the images projected on the retina, to remove the colour contamination introduced by the spectral bias in the light source. The sky is blue, but everything you see under a blue sky isn’t blue.
"This is because your visual system is pretty darn good at figuring out what part of the light that you’re seeing is caused by the light source, and what part is caused by the surfaces themselves. We only really care about the surfaces – this is the part of the light that tells us about objects. The colour of the light itself is usually pretty meaningless," Bevil was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
The neuroscientist further explained that the manipulated photo had a lot of the turquoise cast over the whole image
"When you first look at it, after having looked at the pink version, your visual system is still adapted to the lighting conditions of the pink version and so you see the turquoise in the other version, and you attribute this to the shoe itself," he said.
"But after a while, your visual system adapts to the turquoise across the whole of that image and interprets it as part of the light source, eventually discounting it and restoring the shoe to the original pink version (or at least pinker)."
